Topics Ethics

Question If a moral agent (a person) commits an act that he/she believes to be a morally right act, but it turns out the act is morally wrong, is that person blameworthy for committing it?

Accepted:
December 4, 2008

Comments

Perhaps. It may depend on whether the agent's false beliefs were reasonable. Philosophers sometimes say we have a concept of objective right and wrong, which is what's right or wrong depending on what the facts are, whether or not the agent does or can recognize these facts. This concept of objective rightness or wrongness is often contrasted with a concept of subjective rightness or wrongness, which relativizes rightness and wrongness to the agent's beliefs or to information that was available to the agent at the time. Those who make this distinction often say that moral appraisal of actions is a matter of objective rightness but that praise and blame ought to be tied to subjective rightness. If we do this, we can make room for the idea that someone might have done something wrong but remain blameless for it. But I'm not sure we want the mere fact of sincere false belief to excuse. One way to think of subjective rightness or wrongness is as what would be right or wrong if the beliefs on which the agent acted were true. On this rather anemic conception of subjective rightness, the agent who does something wrong falsely believing it to be right or falsely believing it to have features that would make it right would not be blameworthy. But I think we might prefer a more robust form of subjective rightness that relativizes rightness and wrongness to what the agent reasonably or non-negligently believes. On this more robust conception of subjective rightness, sincere false belief does not automatically excuse. To know whether we should excuse wrongdoing, we would have to know whether the agent's false beliefs were reasonable or at least not unreasonable given available evidence. Only then should we excuse. Anyway, that's one way you might want to think about your question.

Good question. And let's hope the answer is yes, since otherwise almost no one would be blameworthy for committing morally wrong acts. After all, it seems likely that Hitler, Stalin, Osama Bin Laden, Jim Jones (Jonestown massacre), dare I say, Dick Cheney, and many other people who have done manifestly wrong things nonetheless believed they were doing the morally right thing.

So, it looks like we need to find a way to blame them for believing that the wrong things they were doing were the right things to do. We want to be able to say, "They should have known better!" (Such cases may be contrasted with people who do bad things because they are weak-willed and do what they believe is wrong--of those people we want to be able to say, "They should have tried harder!") In both the wrong-headed and the weak-willed cases, we sometimes mitigate responsibility and blame if we think it would be unreasonable to expect that they could have known better or could have overcome their, say, addictive or compulsive desires. For instance, consider whether some racists and sexists of centuries past may have grown up in a family and culture that made it difficult to impossible for them to know better. The free will problem rears its ugly head here, since we may wonder if ultimately anyone can know better or try harder, given the past conditions that shape them.

But we may avoid that skeptical conclusion if we think that most people have the normal rational and self-control capacities to be responsible for their wrong-headed moral beliefs or weak-willed actions, especially if they have been exposed to the morally right beliefs. For instance, if we assume that Hitler was not insane, it is fair to assume he was exposed to more accurate beliefs about the value of all humans, including Jews, and he could have thought harder and better about whether he was right about the conclusions he drew about Jews and the Final Solution.

Another way to consider these issues is to think that people who do wrong must know it in some sense that they are doing wrong (maybe unconsciously). But his answer seems to require too much ad hoc maneuvering.

Question If a moral agent (a person) commits an act that he/she believes to be a morally right act, but it turns out the act is morally wrong, is that person blameworthy for committing it? Accepted:December 4, 2008

Question If a moral agent (a person) commits an act that he/she believes to be a morally right act, but it turns out the act is morally wrong, is that person blameworthy for committing it?

Accepted:
December 4, 2008